* Still need to measure power consumption of the camera, but it seems that the 850 mA LiPo battery should be sufficient.

* Still need to measure power consumption of the camera, but it seems that the 850 mA LiPo battery should be sufficient.

* Ordered battery, charger and some other parts for integration from [http://electrokit.se Electrokit]

* Ordered battery, charger and some other parts for integration from [http://electrokit.se Electrokit]

+

+

=== 2010.09.24 ===

+

* Package from Electrokit has arrived. There was a small mistake in the package in that instead of 0.75 and 1 mm DC plugs I received microphone plugs! Important but not critical! Everything else looks OK.

Logbook

2009.06.18

At last, received the Gumstix Overo Fire. IRL smaller than I expected even though I knew the size. Weight 6g confirmed.

2009.09.01

The power connector on the Summit board is very non-standard, see PJ1-022-SMT. I say it is non standard because I couldn't find a single electronics supplier that has this particular size in their series. Do there really expect people to buy that god damn wall plug? I will just mount two wires directly on the board.

2009.11.09

Finally created an alternate power connector for the summit board, see http://twitpic.com/oxe4d
Powered up the Gumstix following the instructions on the website. Ångstrom boots up all right. The first boot took a long time because it had to configure god knows how many GNOME games and other stupid things – it took several minutes. The second boot was much, much faster, less than a minute.

No power manager installed.

WiFi and BT seemed alive but of course there was no connection and I don't know how they are configured. I tried to scan for BT devices from my Mac and there was something. I didn't want to connect since I didn't know if it was the Gumstix or maybe something fishy from one of my neighbors. I'll have to find some docs about these. Btw. a quick scan on the website didn't really turn anything up. I hope this doesn't mean that the Gumstix is just another not very well documented thing.

2010.06.22

e-con Systems expect to release a 5MPix camera module soon, see blog post. This blog post also suggests that capturing and encoding 720p @ 30fps is possible on the OMAP.

2010.08.14

Had a quick half-day session with my Gumstix Overo.

Did not find any USB mini-A to mini-B cable in regular computer shop.

Gumstix Overo is still alive and the boot messages scroll through the tty; however, I did not get any image on the DVI monitor! I tried two different monitors, there is simply no signal. I was wondering if I have damaged the DVI output or something else.

I decided that I will but a Tobi expansion board, which has Ethernet interface, and also one of these new small breakout boards.

2010.08.17

Ordered a Gumstix Tobi and a Pinto-TH board. Also included a USB mini-A to mini-B cable and an wall plug into the package since I was missing them.

2010.08.19

Package from Gumstix has arrived. They put two USB mini-A to mini-B cables in the package :)

2010.09.01

Decided that we will try to get the Gumstix Overo ready for an amateur rocket flight on 2010.10.03

Functional scope TBD but it is highly unlikely that we can have live video feed or anything like that.

2010.09.06

Decided that the scope of the rocket flight will be recording video

Still pending whether we can get the gumstix up and running in time

2010.09.08

Set up the Gumstix Overo + Tobi on a workbench. Thsi will be a permanent setup for now.

Some issues that need to be resolved ASAP

Ethernet on Tobi does not work (could be due to old image on NAND)

Boots from flash but then loads OS from NAND!

2010.09.11

Tried with newly flashed image on new µSD card. No luck but noticed an error message right at the beginning of boot:

Also note the version string! I should be Angstrom 2010.7-test-20100909 overo ttyS2

After making a new flash and initializing it I made the mistake selecting a different Enlightenment settings and now it take the desktop long time to come up after the onsole login appears :(

Webcam

Connected the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000. Showed up as /dev/video0 and I could start cheese, but no luck capturing – Cheese said it has captured and LED on camera was ON for a while but image area was blank.

Capture and save raw video

but it requires very high bandwidth. I have a Class 6 microSD, but what is the maximum rate we can achieve on the Gumstix Overo?

YUY2:

160x120: 38400 byte/frame

320x240: 153600 bytes/frame

640x480: 614400 bytes/frame

800x600: 960000 bytes/frame

1600x1200: 3840000 bytes/frame

YV12 and YU12 (I420):

640x480: 460800 bytes/frame

1600x1200: 2880000 bytes/frame

RGB3 and BGR3:

640x480: 921600 bytes/frame

1600x1200: 5760000 bytes/frame

→ Measure disk I/O throughput

Capture MJPG video

I don't know how to do it with Gstreamer. I tried the image/jpeg caps as in Pixel formats but can not play the resulting file in anything.

→ Can we find a working pipeline for capturing JP from camera?

Capturing using the guvcview CLI results in a file playable by VLC and mplayer. Unfortunately, the GUI can not be turned off!

→ Can we make guvcview work without having X11?

Capture and save JPG images

Using a Gstreamer pipeline with image/jpg and multifilesink generates unreadable files.

Uvccapture captures JPG from camera and saves to file. Unfortunately, it can not use dynamic filenames or capture with higher frame rate than 1 fps. The good news is that uvccapture is very simple and easy to modify.

Did some more testing with jpeg/avi and it seems to be a good option, provided that it will also work on the Gumstix Overo Fire. I have tried it on an old desktop and the MBP where it ran without any noticable CPU load.

2010.09.21

Tried capturing MJPG using the Class 6 microSD card. Results were practically the same as with the slower microSD card, i.e. capture only possible up about 800x456 at 30 fps (or 640x480). See recorded test videos here: http://files.oz9aec.net/video/Gumstix/2010.09.21-mjpg/

Tried to investigate whether bottleneck is at the USB end or the microSD interface:

Camera+USB can sustain 1280x720 at 30 fps using a desktop PC ⇒ USB hub is OK

Camera capturing 800x600 at 10 fps then upsampled to 30 fps using videorate is OK ⇒ microSD card can sustain the data rate

Camera capturing 800x600 at 30 fps then downsampled to 10 fps is not OK ⇒ Bottleneck is at the USB interface!

Note: The videorate element in Gstreamer can be used to convert between two different frame rates by either duplicating or deleting frames from the incoming stream.

Discussed the situation with ERU, given that we can not get higher than 640x480 / 800x456. Options are to go on and use the Gumstix Overo Fire at this resolution or to switch to another off the shelf HD camcorder. We decided to continue since even with this limitation it is a step towards the long term goal of an open source real time video streaming platform.

2010.09.22

Measured power consumption of Gumstix OVero Fire mounted on the Summit expansion board:

250 mA during startup.

350-400 mA after WiFi gets turned on.

Still need to measure power consumption of the camera, but it seems that the 850 mA LiPo battery should be sufficient.

Ordered battery, charger and some other parts for integration from Electrokit

2010.09.24

Package from Electrokit has arrived. There was a small mistake in the package in that instead of 0.75 and 1 mm DC plugs I received microphone plugs! Important but not critical! Everything else looks OK.